Choices, Chapter 1

A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist.

Choices, Chapter 1, Part 1 -- Laird’s Choice

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 01 Laird’s choice
Chapter 02 A hairstylist’s choice
Chapter 03 Amber’s choice
Chapter 04 A preacher’s choice
Chapter 05 A teacher’s choice
Chapter 06 A psychologist’s choice
Chapter 07 A coach’s choice
Chapter 08 A lesbian’s choice
Chapter 09 A ballet school's choice
Chapter 10 Choice at McDonald's
Chapter 11 A choice of tea parties
Chapter 12 A Na’vi choice
Chapter 13 Kirk’s choice
Chapter 14 A Shakespearean choice
Chapter 15 Mandy’s choice
Chapter 16 Maggie’s choice
Chapter 17 Blair’s choice
Chapter 18 A wedding choice

The letter came from the most prestigious doctor in the Pacific Northwest. Yet she let it drop to the floor. Tears furrowed her makeup. Maggie looked old and crumpled, her life’s struggle ended at age thirty-nine.

Sagging into an armchair, her head lowered in defeat, her hands pressed against throbbing temples, Maggie couldn’t get the word out of her brain. It seized her mind like the devil’s mantra: infertile, infertile, infertile, infertile … INFERTILE! So there it was: she would never have a daughter. She couldn’t conceive and the government had already callously informed her that she was too old to adopt an American baby.

As for foreign orphans, Maggie had decided long ago that these should stay in their own village and culture; for the past eighteen years she had been a foster parent to a succession of Ethiopian girls. There had been Adina, Gabra Aisha, Yenee and Tenagne — the children of dirt farmers or herders. Try, try as she might, she had never connected with them emotionally; their stunted lives were simply too alien and their choices too constricted to require the insights or empathy of a “coupon clipper” living in the suburban Pacific Northwest. (She had divorced a Microsoft insider.)

Besides, and maybe this made her less than a perfect human being in the eyes of the intolerant folk who preached tolerance and diversity, she had always wanted a daughter that looked like herself — a flaxen-haired Scots-Irish American minx with emerald eyes and a flush in her ivory cheeks.

Life’s greatest irony, Maggie bitterly thought, was the recent arrival in her life of a near-perfect child, one who looked amazingly like the daughter in her dreams — a slight, faun-like creature with naturally fleshy, blood-rich lips; pale, wispy eyebrows; luxuriant eyelashes fluttering like butterflies around sparkling eyes of emerald green above a button nose. The child moved with an ethereal, feminine grace (even though it lacked even the most basic of athletic skills). It had the voice of an angel, a treble soloist in the school chorus.

Blair, age ten, would have been the ideal daughter for any mother if he weren’t a boy.

Maggie often wondered: Did Laird, her passionate, attentive lover these past seven months and Blair’s natural father, recognize the girl in a son who loved to gossip and to cook, whose taste in popular music ran the gamut in teen idols from David Archuleta to the Jonas Brothers, and who dressed with precious impeccability, his palate of colors composed of dramatic reds, yellows, greens, pinks and purples. Blair especially treasured a pink “1842” tee shirt from Abercrombie and Fitch that he’d seen Justin Bieber, his absolute fave, sporting in a candid photo. Any mention of the fifteen-year-old Bieber gave Blair the vapors.

How could the father not see the girl in the son who sat, feline-like, almost purring, for an hour while Maggie brushed, combed and teased his long, golden locks? How many ten-year-old boys fretted over “split ends”?

Once, emboldened by strong spirits and ardent lovemaking, Maggie, as she lay naked with Laird in the dark, finally dared to ask not only about Blair, but also about Blair’s brother Kirk. Aged thirteen, red-haired, freckled, wide-eared, big-boned, pug-nosed Kirk so differed from his younger brother, both emotionally and physically, that it was difficult to believe that they had the same parents. Kirk, family friends declared to be “all boy”; Blair, they’d rather not discuss. Kirk lived for sports and harsh, raucous music, his bedroom wall festooned with posters of female rockers and jocks.

Where Blair came across as sweet-natured, docile and malleable, Kirk struck almost everyone as aggressive, angry, and obdurate. Driven by inner demons or raging hormones, he wouldn’t take the time to comb his hair or to allow Maggie to untangle it. So Kirk had opted for a buzz cut on his twelfth birthday when he announced that he’d probably shave his head when he got to high school. “Just like Britney Spears and Ani DiFranco.”

It was Kirk, therefore, that Maggie asked about first as the two lovers spooned: “Laird honey, Kirk worries me. I don’t know why, but he’s a very angry kid. Today he got sent home from school for hitting a girl — Stephanie Hawkins — you know, she’s the daughter of Bill and Helen, who live on Oak Street. A black eye, he gave her a black eye. He actually punched her, can you believe it?”

Laird’s neck muscles visibly tightened. He replied slowly, each word carefully chosen: “From what I understand, Maggie, the girl deserved a good hiding. Kirk said she had been spreading lies about him, and that she couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret — despite a blood oath.”

“Gruesome, no?” Maggie responded:

While there weren’t any details, Principal Archer said that he didn’t blame Kirk for hitting the girl, given her foul mouth and depraved imagination. But still, the school has a zero tolerance policy for violence, which is why he had to suspend Kirk for a day and a half. Don’t worry; I’ll make sure Kirk doesn’t get to treat tomorrow like a holiday. But, Laird, we can’t ignore the violence. He actually hit a girl as hard as he could! What should we do about it?

“Hire her a boxing coach?”

When he felt Maggie stiffen, Laird hoarsely whispered: “Are you suggesting a child psychiatrist?” Wordlessly she caressed his shoulders. So Laird continued:

Well, maybe, but there is no need for haste. The boy’s only thirteen. He’s still a young kid who has yet to develop an appropriate reverence for the fairer sex. I’ll wager he still thinks girls are yucky because they’re afraid of spiders and toads. But he will soon enough become an admirer of femininity — or at least of a special girl’s feminine charms. I give him a year at most. In any case, I’ll have a frank talk with Kirk tomorrow.

After a pause, Laird sighed: “Now, I suspect you’ll want to talk about Blair.” As he spoke, Laird’s muscles relaxed. Oddly, he didn’t seem concerned that Maggie, taking her cue, would once again question Blair’s sexuality. It had been her favorite topic for more than a month.

While most fathers would have been outraged to have a woman challenge their son’s “masculinity,” Laird, no fool, was well aware that Blair’s teachers and principal judged him to be the male pupil most likely to end up as a ballet dancer, hair stylist or interior decorator. Schoolyard scuffles had made clear the like opinion of his male classmates, who, after displaying their own masculinity with a shove or a fist, had largely left him to find friends, as best he could, amongst the “other girls”.

“I know, Maggie, that you share the common belief that Blair is gay. I think you’re wrong — virtually every boy is a bit fey at ten. It’s tough to be hyper-masculine when you’re still prettier than most adult women. I wasn’t the world’s butchest preteen either, and I certainly didn’t end up gay. Now did I?” And with that he lowered one of Maggie’s hands to find his sex rampant.

“Nobody could be a better lover for a woman than you, honey; but we’re talking about Blair. And I think you’re entirely right. The boy’s not gay and never will be.” As she spoke, she squeezed but did not stroke Laird’s maleness; she wanted her lover’s rapt attention for what she was about to say next.

Laird interjected:

Now I am truly confused. All this time I’ve thought you considered Blair to be a sissy boy. In fact, I was afraid that you were leading up to a suggestion that we throw a house party for him so that he could invite his first boyfriend to a dance. I must say I’m relieved that you don’t want me to ask him at dinner if he’s hot after the body of that mop-haired boy singer that he likes so much.

Maggie giggled. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall if you ever had to have that heart-to-heart with your son. But don’t worry — Blair isn’t gay. I’ve concluded he’s something … very … different. You might not want to hear it, which is why I’ve only been hinting so far that he’s a very atypical boy, sexually that is.”

“But what, if not gay?”

“Laird, do you know what a transsexual is?”

His body stiffened, even as part of it shrank from her caress.

“Yes, I believe I know. Are you suggesting that Blair wants to be a girl? Or, worse, that he already sees himself to be a girl, a girl who’s — how does the cliché go? — trapped in a boy’s body?”

“Yes … and yes. I am positive that Blair would rather be a girl than a boy and I’m almost certain that he’ll confirm, if properly asked, that he is emotionally and mentally a girl, and he hates the genitals that God errantly gave him.”

Laird muttered inaudibly. Maggie hesitated, considering her options, and then plunged to the goal line, her left hand gripped firmly on the balls while her right feverishly worked to ensure that her lover man, when he finally answered, would be receiving advice from both of his heads. Just as he arched in pleasure, Maggie spiked in the end zone: “I know where to find the hormones and surgeon he’ll need. I even know where to find a geek who can hack into vital records to change the M to F. I can help you to give Blair the life she truly wants and needs. You’ve always known the truth about Blair; after all, you named her Blair Lindsay, not Kirk Alexander.”

“Maggie,” he sighed, “Don’t go reading too much into the names. It was my wife, bless her soul, who chose them for the boys. All four names are traditional for the males in her family. I was hoping that one of them could be named Laird Jr., but no such luck.”

Maggie kept pushing:

But you do have to admit that Blair could — look at his face, his physique, and most of all, his hair — easily attend school, a different one, as a girl. I could take Blair shopping for suitable makeup and clothes. Meanwhile, my geek could hack into Blair’s school records (it’s a piece of cake, he says) and after that there’ll be no question that Blair is a she — especially if we propel her rapidly through puberty with a maximum of estrogen and a minimum of testosterone. Let’s face it: Blair is probably already as light on male hormones as he is on his feet. Blair Lindsay could never be “all boy” like Kirk Angus, but with our help she can be “all girl” before she starts dating for keeps in her senior year of high school.

Maggie had made her pitch. Would she get permission to start raising a daughter ... her daughter? Laird was the only obstacle to Blair’s transformation, she figured, for no one else much cared what happened to the effeminate boy. His handful of “friends”, more acquaintances and all of them female, only saw him at school. Moreover, Kirk didn’t seem to like his brother; they rarely played together. Blair’s school and church would probably be happy to have one less “problem,” and his only living relatives lived far away in Scotland. As they came from his mother’s side, they had gradually lost touch with the two boys and their father since her excruciating death from breast cancer five years previously. It was doubtful they’d care if one of their “American cousins” changed genders, so long as “she” stayed away from the ancestral hearth.

As for Blair himself, Maggie didn’t believe he would put up much of a fight to preserve what little “masculinity” he had been allotted. She’d have to go slowly, always with his assent, one short, feminizing step at a time, but she was nevertheless confident that it would take less than a year or two to transform Blair into a girl in every way that counted, save for the final surgeon’s cut.

Easy-going, docile Blair was, she’d decided, infinitely malleable. He’d put on a dress or a diaper, leather harness or a clown suit — almost any costume that would charm and please the adults in his life, in the desperate hope that they, unlike his birth mother, never would desert him.

Blair was especially anxious to keep Maggie, his father’s first and so far only girlfriend since the funeral, inside the family fold. Blair loved her so fiercely, so openly, so absolutely that Maggie knew that the boy would do almost anything to keep her as a surrogate mother, even if it meant giving up an arm, a leg, or his gender. Dress like a girl for her? Why not? It beat the alternatives.

Maggie had no doubt Blair would dress up like Little Bo Peep if she asked sweetly and menacingly enough. True, he probably couldn’t be rushed into stockings and skirts, but she was pretty sure that Blair could be persuaded to pretend to be a girl for months or years — at least until his upper lip grew enough fuzz to demand a shave -- if he realized that she was far less likely to abandon a daughter than a son. A choice between happiness and loneliness — Was Blair prepared to skirt the difference?

Maybe he had already gotten an inkling of her bias, for Blair had been behaving more effeminately in recent weeks. Just two days ago Laird had asked him “to stop prancing around like Adam Lambert” (the flamboyant, sequined successor to the bejeweled Liberace). “You don’t always have to be on stage,” Laird had said. “Take off the party mask. We want to see the true you.”

Maggie agreed: She didn’t want Blair to act like a female; she wanted him to be a female. She wanted a real daughter, a daughter for life, and “realism” advised her that Blair’s inevitable teen rebellion would probably put him back into boys’ pants and, with much noisy recrimination, effectively out of her life … unless … unless Blair had already become a girl in mind and body, his original genitalia either gone or forgotten. Thus, Maggie wanted Blair to have an actual sex change, achieved as quickly and as irreversibly as Maggie could arrange, with due deference to nature’s rhythms and disdain for Man’s laws. She was even willing to risk jail to assure that Blair would become and remain her daughter for life. If Blair felt the need as a teenager to dismay her parents, let her bring home a foul-mouthed, lesbian lover for dinner.

“We want to see the true you” — Laird had actually said it to Blair. But did he mean it? As she and Laird lay together, nude bodies entwined, her hands, hips and lips erotically reminding her lover that his own happiness was now as much on the line as Blair’s, Laird mentally submitted. Yet he wanted her to know that he was still calling the shots, at least when it came to his own kids, and so, rolling over, he mounted her. As he repeatedly thrust ever deeper, he lay down his conditions:

First, don’t try to feminize Blair more rapidly than the boy can handle. If Blair complains even once to me, or if there is any hint that Blair feels that he is being ‘panty-trained’ as a form of punishment,” then the experiment ends immediately.

Second, Blair must never be paraded about as a girl in front of people — classmates, neighbors, postal carriers, whoever — who’ve known him as a boy. To ensure against humiliation, all outings as a girl have to be far from home, preferably in another state.

Third, no attempt should be made to alter the boy’s body or chemistry until he’s attained the age of consent. No hormones, no implants, no injections, and certainly no cutting. You’ll have to fake his curves so it will be easy for him to revert to his original gender.

Fourth, Kirk should be told about the “experiment” before it starts and be advised that he can demand an end to it if he “feels creeped out”.

Fifth, and last, Blair should feel as good being a girl as I do having sex with you. Hell, I’m about to become the father of a bouncing tween girl! It feels right!

With those words, Laird erupted inside Maggie. Her body fiercely gripped him as she murmured over and over in Laird’s ear:

Lover, you’ll never regret this decision. Blair will be a lot happier as a girl. He’ll fit in a lot better. And we’ll have the perfect family — a boy for you and a girl for me — and we’ll be the happiest people on earth. That feeling you now have, that feeling I guarantee you for a lifetime. You can have it all, Laird — great sex exactly as you like it, as well as a loving wife to help you raise contented, well-adjusted and drug free kids.

Kids, plural. That forced Laird to catch his breath. “How will Kirk react to his brother’s dressing and behaving like a girl?” the father openly wondered. “I don’t want Kirk to go bad — to become a tough guy to prove he’s not a sissy too.”

Maggie advised:

Don’t fret. I’ve already discussed Blair’s feminization with Kirk. He said that he isn’t surprised — that something has to change. Blair, it seems, has become a real burden for Kirk at school: ‘I’m always having to stand up for the little dude,’ he said; ‘I’ve actually had to pull guys off of him; and whenever I did that, they’d curse me and then tell everyone that I was a fag — just like my sissy brother. Blair and I would both be better off if Blair stopped pretending he was a boy. I’ll even help you get him into panties — you just know that he wants to wear pink satin and bows — if you promise me that you’ll get him out of my life by sending him to a school far from here.’

“So you see, Laird, Blair’s metamorphosis might be the best thing that will ever happen to Kirk and this family.”

Laird then rolled off his lover. He fixed his eyes on the ceiling fixture: “Are you telling me that Kirk actually offered to help turn his brother into a girl?”

“He said he’ll do whatever it takes to get Blair so comfortable with being a girl that ‘she’ll insist on changing schools’. Kirk says he’ll even lie if necessary — by telling Blair how everyone will like him better as a girl and that’s he real pretty in a dress. I actually think that Kirk would model girls’ underwear for Blair if it would entice Blair permanently out of his jockey briefs.”

Laird groaned disapproval. Maggie was exposing a facet of Kirk’s personality — the devious and manipulative side — that he had long noted, but never liked.

Maggie next whispered: “Kirk even said that he knows a boy his own age who’s ‘dumb enough’ to date and kiss Blair without figuring out his true sex. Kirk figures, and I tend to agree, that if Blair has his first romantic and sexual encounters ‘as a girl’ that he’ll never want to act like a boy again. Don’t worry …”

Laird interjected: “Sexual encounters? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Blair’s only ten. He’s much too young to want sex — with girls or boys, with or without panties and briefs.”

Maggie reminded him about the facts of life in the twenty-first century:

The boys are growing up faster than you think. I’m responsible for the laundry around here and I can assure you that there are more than enough telltale stains on the sheets, pillowcases, and underpants of both boys to prove that they’ve discovered the joy of solo sex. Even more telling are the ‘spotted’ magazines that I found under their mattresses — a Virginia’s Secret catalog under Kirk’s and a Tween Beat under Blair’s. Before you ask, Blair especially treasures the photos of a shirtless Justin Bieber and a leather-clad Miley Cyrus.

While Laird absorbed these revelations about his sons’ diverging sexuality, Maggie quickened her pitch:

I truly believe that Blair’s rapid feminization will reduce, if not entirely eliminate the tensions in this family, especially between your two children, and also between us. You know how sad it makes me not to have a daughter. And I’ve seen your muscles tighten and teeth clench whenever we’ve met a single father with a pretty daughter. You’re worried that I’ll leave you for them, that I’m capable of setting up house with another man just so that I can mother his daughter. Well, you can stop worrying about losing me. Blair is, or rather can be, all the daughter I’ve ever wanted or could ever want. Teaching Blair to become a complete woman will enable me to become the complete wife for you and mother for your children.

Laird replied slowly and evenly: “I didn’t realize that Kirk dislikes his brother so much that he’d do almost anything, even parade around in panties, to get rid of him. That’s a real bummer.” Maggie’s kisses gave him some consolation. Laird continued:

I’m afraid you’re right: Kirk for some reason despises “sissies,” and he will never accept, even less love, an effeminate, gay brother. Tragically, once you and I have passed away, my two children will end up kinless on this side of the Atlantic and thus alone in a heartless world. The boys will need each other, but are destined to grow ever farther apart — unless, as you say, Blair fundamentally changes. A sister, Kirk might grow to love, at least when the last vestiges of her maleness have been sloughed off like milk teeth.

He pressed on:

So you’re right, Maggie. You always seem to be right, my love. As the head of this family, the final choice is mine and I now make it. This well-being of this family does seem to depend on Blair’s spending the next few months or years as a girl. After that, he can decide which gender best suits him. If he’s wise, he’ll realize by then that the world is much kinder to a pretty girl than it is to an effeminate boy.

Laird then tapped the bedpost with his fist, wielding it like a judge’s gavel.

Maggie purred:

You’re right, Laird. Blair will never give up his skirts once he’s started wearing them. We’ll start his transformation with some jewelry tomorrow. I’ll take the children shopping at the Pacific Mall downtown. No one is likely to know us there. Kirk’s been asking me to buy him a gold stud for his left ear — to look cool, he says — and I am sure that he’ll regard a second pierced ear as a small price to pay for getting his brother launched towards sisterhood.

“And wear panties too — like Blair?” Laird slowly shook his head: it was impossible to picture his freckle-faced son in anything but boxers or y-fronts.

“Kirk in panties? Not very likely. But then he really does want to see the back of his sissy brother,” said Maggie. “Time will tell.”

Exhausted, yet contented, Maggie and Laird slept like they didn’t have a care in the world.

Continued in Part 2 (Chapter 2, A hairstylist's choice)